Trio of hostages trying to ignore the chains

"Argo" may be grabbing a lot of attention at the cineplex right now. But Frank McGuinness' "Someone Who'll Watch Over Me" provides a portrait of life on the edge in the perpetually troubled Middle East where terror and boredom take precedence over high-stakes undercover gamesmanship.

Instead, the games played by the three hostages in Beirut — an American doctor, an Irish journalist and a British literature professor — are designed solely to preserve their sanity and humanity. They imagine movie scenarios, "write" letters home aloud that will never be sent, and re-enact great sporting events. And in the case of the Brit and the Irishman, they also confront the hundreds of years of sectarian animosity underpinning "the Troubles" in Belfast.

There are undeniable echoes of "Waiting for Godot" in McGuinness' 1992 play (based in part on Irish journalist Brian Keenan's own four-year ordeal as a hostage in Lebanon in the 1980s). But unlike the tramps in Samuel Beckett's world, these men can't leave — they are chained to the wall of their filthy cell (suitably clammy in Andrew Hildner's gray-walled set).

Or is it a room, as the professor insists on first arriving? It's an important distinction. If you call it a "cell," then you're acknowledging that you must have done something worthy of imprisonment — and the three here are guilty of nothing but damnably bad luck. Jack Hickey's Michael, the widowed professor who clings to literature as a balm against his barbaric circumstances, simply chose the wrong time to go to the market for pears — a mundane twist of fate that haunts him. Hickey's contained but well-calibrated performance suggests that quiet Michael has many psychic ghosts.

Kevin Theis' Edward, the loquacious Irish journo, has spent his life running away from his family back home, only to find that he misses them desperately. And Chris Rickett's Adam, despite being in some ways the least-developed character of the three, keeps reliving memories of a childhood during which he felt abandoned by his parents in favor of the host of foster children they raised.

Belinda Bremner's sensitive, if occasionally too leisurely, staging for Oak Park Festival Theatre mutes histrionics in favor of offhand observations and bruising asides — the latter the specialty of Theis' Edward. And there are moments of genuine anguish woven throughout the two acts.

Though neither McGuinness nor Bremner has quite resolved the problem of staging boredom without falling into occasional stretches of near-tedium, "Someone Who'll Watch Over Me" allows the onstage threesome ample opportunity to flesh out an affecting portrait of comradeship and compassion in the worst of circumstances.